CEO and founder of Cropital
Ruel Amparo
It’s 6:30 a.m. and a cloudless sky provides no shade from the beating sun. Carlo, 28, wipes the sheen of sweat from his brow. He’s taking a break from working his family’s rice field, sipping from a jug of water. In the near distance, a light buzzing. Carlo looks up and sees a large drone drifting towards him. He puts the jug down and yells for his father.
Ernesto, 66, is deep inside a half-built poultry house. Leaning against construction supplies set against the wall, he is busy slapping QR stickers on egg trays. He hears his son hollering for him. “Teka lang kamo,” he shouts, over the clucking of his chickens. “Papunta na ako.”
(“Hold on, I’m on my way.)
Carlo takes a step back as the drone lands by his feet. A display comes to life, announcing its arrival. Beside it, a fingerprint scanner. Beside that, a countdown.
“Tay, five minutes lang ‘to pwede mag hintay, naka drone-share lang tayo!”
(“Dad, this can only wait five minutes, we’re just on drone-share!”)
Ernesto plops down a stack of empty trays and hurries out into the field. He zips past an impatient looking Carlo, and kneels down beside the drone. Using his thumbprint, Ernesto registers on the drone’s database. Its display blinks: Farmer #6755.
Carlo’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out and opens the drone service’s proprietary app, and begins thumbing through the log. A map of Farm #6755. Recent activities. Expected date of harvest. Expected yield of harvest. Expected price of goods. He swipes through to a cost estimate on the fertilizer service he ordered and hits confirm.
The drone whirrs in place, and takes off.
It’s 8:00 a.m. and a recently-showered Carlo arrives at city hall for his day job as an administrative assistant. He spots a familiar truck rolling by and waves at its driver, Jessica, the woman who buys his family’s eggs. She’s on her way to the farm to pick up the day’s harvest.
Back at the farm, Ernesto finishes laying down the day’s haul, 50 trays, all properly-sealed and labeled with unique QR code stickers. Jessica arrives ahead of schedule at 8:30 a.m. She gets out of the truck, tablet in hand. Jessica inspects each tray as Ernesto loads them on her flatbed, scanning each QR code as he sets them down. Ernesto finishes the transaction with another thumbprint scan. At that, he gets a notification on his phone. Payment received.
Before leaving, Jessica swipes through a list of reports and shows Ernesto a profitability report on his chicken layer business. She noticed a recent decline in egg production. The AI assistant powering the shared platform throws up a three-point questionnaire to help determine the cause. Ernesto punches in his responses.
“Nutrient deficiency likely,” the assistant reads. “Here’s a list of vitamin fixes you might be want to consider.”
Ernesto recognizes one he’s purchased from Jessica before, and puts in the order. Now in the system, the package will be ready by the time Jessica starts tomorrow’s round of pickups and deliveries.
4:00 p.m. strikes and Ernesto is at the barangay hall for the weekly farmers’ meeting. The facilitator begins with a weather forecast, then a pest/disease report of their area and neighboring barangays. A productivity ranking of different farms follows. This week, Farm #6755 tops the list. Ernesto beams.
. . .
It’s 7:00 p.m. and Rachel, 36, finishes her shift managing an IT company in New Clark City. Before heading home, she dips into a nearby grocery store to pick up some kitchen essentials.
Navigating the aisles, she stops by a stack of egg trays. She pulls out her phone and scans the QR code. An annotated map loads, pinging the eggs’ point of origin and date harvested. A picture of a smiling old man named Ernesto appears on her screen. She scrolls through to find that Ernesto is hoping to raise funds on Cropital to finish building his layer poultry farming business. She places the eggs in her cart and finishes shopping.
At the checkout counter, Rachel shows her Cropital Lender app and receives discounts for her purchases. On her way out of the grocery store, she swipes back to Ernesto’s funding campaign and hits pledge.
Elsewhere, on a farm, a notification pings. “Congratulations! Funding goals met.”
Editor’s Note: As we hurtle into the fourth industrial age, business leaders and new entrants alike have obsessed over the disrupting forces of technology, leading to fragmented views of where we’re all headed. To help set the course, SparkUp consulted experts and futurists to explore a world set one decade from today, where today’s cutting edge trends have become our shared reality. This piece of speculative fiction hopes to inspire readers to build towards a world where technology is seen as an augmenting — and not disrupting — force to human work.
